To document Bigfoot reports and encounters and the history of bigfoot in Trimble,Carroll and Henry Counties of Kentucky and Eastern Kentucky.Follow us on facebook under The Northern Kentucky Bigfoot Research Group Trimble County Kentucky /

Saturday, July 12, 2014

Finding Bigfoot Season Five – Kentucky-Bigfoot Call of the Wildman

Finding Bigfoot Season Five – Kentucky-Bigfoot Call of the Wildman

The team’s second trip to Kentucky was due to the evidence collected by Tom Shay of Trimble County, KY. Tom has quietly been investigating local sightings of bigfoots for a number of years now, and has come across quite a few possible footprints, nearly all of which he cast. Tom is not driven by proving sasquatches are real, but rather he is interested in learning about the creatures. Even more than this, though, is that he simply enjoys the investigations. His philosophy and quiet demeanor matches mine very well, and we hit it off immediately.
Tom’s footprint cast collection is excellent. Some of the casts came in conjunction with visual sightings adding to their credibility. Not all the casts are picture-perfect, but that is because Tom casts almost everything he and his partners find, not just the clear ones. (I highly recommend all bigfooters to do the same.) The casts show several prints left by the same individual at different locations, and with dramatically different toe splay. Some show evidence of a highly flexible mid-foot, and one even has clear dermatoglyphics. The collection of casts is excellent evidence of the presences of at least a couple sasquatches in the area.
The majority of Tom’s footprints have been from a piece of private land where only he and his research partner Rodney are allowed to go. It took a while to gain the trust of the property owner before he would let Tom have access to the property because apparently it is known to the owner that a family group of sasquatches has taken up residence in the more inaccessible corners of his land. The Finding Bigfoot team was not granted access to this property (I can’t blame the property owner at all for this), but we were allowed access to the property adjacent to the larger parcel for a night investigation.

Steep hollows are the name of the game when bigfooting in Trimble County, and our night investigation involved traversing several of them. After a precarious journey to the bottom of one of these draws, Matt and I made our way to the ridge on the other side. Soon after one of my calls, we both heard what sounded like a knock off to our right and part way down the hill. I didn’t think the knock was very close, but Matt thought it was. Soon thereafter, we heard movement in the brush from this general direction, but we never got to see what was making the noise. It is unknown if the knock and the brush movement were related.
Obviously, one of the highlights of this episode was the on-screen presence of Ernie and Neal from Animal Planet’s Call of the Wildman. Bobo and Ranae were slated to do a witness interview with Ernie about his bigfoot sighting from 1974 when he was nine years old, and then to later take him and Neal out for a night investigation. (Charlie Raymond of Kentucky Bigfoot has written up Ernie’s story and has done the property follow-up on the encounter.) I was a little bummed I couldn’t go, but I had met the due at the Animal Planet offices a few months prior to this expedition and heard Ernie’s story first hand on that occasion.

While Bobo, Ranae, and Matt were busy elsewhere, I visited Leanette, a long-term witness who has had several encounters on her property. One encounter from September 27, 2013 was particularly interesting because she saw a creature looking in her window. Windows don’t change size, so they provide a static gauge to guess the size of bigfoots looking through them. She noticed light getting blocked out of the window frame when she turned to see two amber colored eyes, approximately 8 to 10 inches apart, looking at her. On-site measurements yielded an approximate size for the sasquatch of 8.5 feet (or possibly taller, as the eyes themselves were at 8 feet above the ground) with 42-inch-wide shoulders.
After seeing the creature peering through her window, it seemed to turn to its left and walk out of frame. Her dog was barking wildly, and as Leanette went towards the door, the dog pushed its way ahead of her and obstructed her path as if to keep her inside. She then ran upstairs to look out the window into the yard on the backside of the house where the creature might have gone to. From there she saw a sasquatch squatting behind a bush in her yard. This creature was about 55 inches tall tall when squatting down, and it is unknown if it was the same creature or a different one. She saw its profile, and it had black hair, copper-colored skin, and a “weak” chin. Leanette then yelled at it, and the creature then yelled back at her very loudly. Since that time, she has found impressions of two different individuals on her grass and in her garden, and has heard screams that she cannot identify.

Our next witness interview was to be with Miranda. She saw a possible sasquatch from a long distance away. It wasn’t her sighting that compelled us to visit, though. She and her family found what they think was a sasquatch footprint in the woods across the way from her home just a few days before our visit. The weather hadn’t turned against us, but we didn’t know when the rain would come.
It’s hard to say if Miranda saw a sasquatch or not. The distance was just too great to make out the details we would need to come to a conclusion. Tom Shay told us that there have been several other sightings within a half mile of this location that he found credible, and a couple of them were in daylight. It is not entirely out of the question, but the answer is something that we may never know.
The footprint that Miranda’s daughter found across the way is one that I deem inconclusive. It might have been just a naturally occurring mark in the ground. The print would have indicated that the creature was moving into a brambly area that showed no signs of recent passage. I left the print in the custody of Tom Shay, and we both have our doubts about the cast being from a bigfoot.
A special surprise that made this Kentucky expedition special was a visit to the Louisville Slugger Factory and Museum in Louisville, KY. Rick Redman at the museum hooked us up with one-of-a-kind baseball bats for tree knocking. Upon our request, he gave us four more bats without inscriptions so we could save our special ones and not beat them up too much by hitting trees with them.

Our final night investigation location was chosen with the help of Tom Shay and a local witness. A woman saw a sasquatch walking along the treeline from her home not long before our visit, and the patch of woods went from where the creature walked down many miles to the Ohio River. Bobo and I teamed up and went into the hollow and made some noise. Bobo and I heard some very close and clear bigfoot vocalizations from above us on the ridge. We heard five vocalizations, each one progressively closer to us. The last was estimated to have come from just above the crest of the hill we were under, but was not a howl like the others. It was more of a garbled yell. They were some of the most impressive vocalizations I’ve had the pleasure of hearing.
Trimble county is an excellent place for both bigfoots and the bigfooters who search for them. Huge kudos go to both Tom Shay for gathering so many excellent footprints, as well as to Charlie Raymond who so diligently gathers eyewitness accounts from this area.